Join us for our fifth installment of bijou!
Joe Yorty will present two new works outside and in the dark - a looping video and an ephemeral object. Wendell Kling’s sounds will accompany the works.
Joe Yorty is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures, paintings, collages, videos and photographs that largely address the anxieties and absurdities associated with American domestic culture. By deploying the objects, textures, and colors of the suburban home Joe brings into question the things that link the middle-class domestic interior (front and back yard too) to notions of class and taste. The pathos of cheap or half-assed attempts at fancy is at the core of most everything he creates. Cast off tchotchkes, used and leftover building materials, faux surfaces, and rejected latex paint gather into formal works that function as culture critique. While many of these materials are sourced second-hand it is no coincidence that most of the rest of the material that he uses in his studio is purchased at home improvement stores.
Since the late 1980’s Wendell has directed and promoted individual and collaborative performances and installations in marginalized spaces throughout the Southern California region and nationally. These performances explore the relationship between sculpture and performance beginning with three-dimensional tableaux that are manipulated and transformed in front of a live audience. Relationships between audience members, sculpture and viewer, and performer and audience are explored during cathartic, spectacular and carnivalesque events. These events combine sculptural objects with theatrical constructs of space, lighting (projected images), sets, video/film and sound into time-based artworks